Greenland's colonial subordination to Denmark

Greenland's colonial subordination to Denmark is not confined to a past regime or a single instrument of rule. The novel presents it as a changing arrangement that reaches into mining, government, military access, schooling, and cultural representation. Its most direct forms may fade, but authority persists in who controls resources and decisions, who sets the terms of education, and who is permitted to enter or interpret the Arctic. Against that structure, the novel places Greenlandic knowledge as lived practice: in hunting, movement, language, and relations with others, it is neither an ethnographic relic nor a simple opposite to European culture.

Resources, administration, and unequal authority

The mining economy makes colonial power visible in the organization of ordinary life. At the Saqqaq quarry, Greenlanders were largely excluded from mining work and employed chiefly as cleaning staff, while Danish workers occupied the central roles. A strict division between Danes and Inuit had been maintained from the opening of the mine. The arrangement was not only social: mining access and employment were administered through a company operating in a restricted area, and later support for Greenlandic workers was mediated through corporate decisions. When Isaiah’s father died on a geological expedition, the company awarded a pension to his widow and child. The former chief accountant acknowledged that there may have been no legal obligation to pay it, and that her own advice may have influenced the board. The episode shows both the reality of material dependence and the discretionary power exercised by institutions over people with limited leverage.

The company’s internal hierarchy echoed this broader division. Its six separate cafeterias distinguished workers, office personnel, technicians, supervisors and accounting staff, scientific personnel, and directors. On May 17, 1957, the day she was appointed chief accountant, the former chief accountant challenged Minister of Social Welfare Strinecke over the disparity, invoking the first Christian congregation’s sharing of possessions. The minister answered with a biblical distinction between what was owed to God and to Caesar; within a few years, the six cafeterias had become one. The change demonstrates that internal inequalities could be contested and modified, but it does not dissolve the larger structure in which Danish institutions managed Greenlandic labor, resources, and welfare.

The narrative also draws attention to the limits of public accountability. The company was partly state-supported, the government held a third of its shares and had representatives on its board, and copies of accounts were made and examined by public auditors. Yet cooperation with private companies and the hierarchy inside the organization produced complex arrangements, while some sections of the books remained inaccessible even to the chief accountant. Public oversight and institutional openness therefore existed alongside restricted knowledge and decision-making. The colonial relationship appears not as a simple absence of rules, but as a system in which formal procedures and partial transparency could coexist with unequal access to power.

Military access and continuing control

Control over Greenland is also exercised through military administration. Since the establishment of Thule Air Base, civilian passengers traveling to Greenland had been subject to restrictions intended to give intelligence services time to examine their backgrounds and political reliability. The scrutiny extended to whether travelers had been confirmed in the Lutheran Church, came from a suitable family, and were considered insulated from communist influence. The significance of this practice lies in the gatekeeping itself: access to the North was not simply a matter of geography or civilian travel, but could be filtered through security judgments made by Danish authorities.

Smilla’s own experience makes that power personal. Across nine expeditions in twelve years, she served as navigator and worked with confidential maps, satellite and radar photographs, and military meteorological observations. Each expedition required her to sign a secrecy declaration, and the authorities retained copies. A Danish official presents her history in Greenland as evidence that she had been allowed to see and hear things that would have remained beyond her reach elsewhere in Danish territory. Her access grants her knowledge, but it also reveals the political conditions under which that knowledge was obtained: expedition work was entangled with military information and controlled permissions.

The novel connects this administrative reach to the intimate meaning of space. Greenland has no prisons, and offenses that might lead to imprisonment in Denmark more often receive fines there. Smilla’s account contrasts the open spaces of her childhood with the locked room as the defining image of a Greenlandic hell. The passage gives the state’s power a spatial dimension: confinement is not an abstract penalty but the deprivation of a form of freedom shaped by growing up in a place where living indoors or remaining in one place for long was unthinkable. The threat of imprisonment in a soundproof room therefore carries a particular force for someone whose sense of freedom is bound to movement and open space.

Schooling, language, and cultural representation

The promise of equal rights through Danish education is presented as inseparable from linguistic assimilation. After Smilla and other children moved from a village school to Qaanaaq, their teachers did not speak Greenlandic and had no plans to learn it. Students who excelled were told that Danish would offer admission to Denmark, a degree, and escape from Arctic hardship. The language of opportunity thus also established the terms on which opportunity could be imagined: advancement required movement toward Danish institutions and away from Greenlandic speech.

The consequences unfold gradually. In Denmark, Smilla initially feels that she will never forget her mother tongue, because it is the language in which she thinks and remembers. But after she has been away, an ordinary word can suddenly become difficult to retrieve. Later, she tries to relearn Greenlandic without either wholly succeeding or wholly failing. Her experience makes language attrition more than a matter of vocabulary: it marks the weakening of a connection to personal memory and cultural belonging. The corrosion of safety-line carabiners by sea fog provides the novel with a concrete comparison for that deterioration: objects that appear dependable can be weakened by exposure, just as a language can erode without being suddenly abandoned.

The book resists the idea that Greenlandic culture should be understood through European standards of development or preserved as an innocent spectacle. Smilla invokes an Inuit account, told by Aisivak to Knud Rasmussen, in which two men create a population of children; she also describes historical examples of women who hunted as men did. These references place gendered and social life within Greenlandic understandings that cannot be reduced to European categories. Her mother, in particular, did not exchange one fixed identity for another: she gave birth and took part in women’s domestic life while also hunting, paddling a kayak, and bringing meat home. Smilla presents this combination as a lived reality that unsettles any easy division between what is supposedly feminine and masculine.

Her mother’s dealings with European visitors likewise refuse the image of an unchanged people waiting to be observed. She could meet guests with elaborate courtesy while using the encounter to obtain what she needed. She hunted with a kayak made according to an older North Greenlandic tradition, yet used a sealed plastic container as a hunting float. The contrast is not evidence of cultural purity or cultural disappearance; it shows a person choosing and adapting tools within her own practical world. Smilla’s claim that Thule will never become a museum challenges the ethnographic dream of preserving Inuit life as a collection of familiar images for outsiders.

Lived knowledge and the terms of understanding

The novel measures the distance between institutional descriptions of Greenland and the knowledge acquired by living there. Smilla argues that another culture cannot be understood by ranking it on a European scientific scale. The route she describes is practical and relational: live within the culture, ask to be tolerated as a guest, and learn its language. Understanding, if it comes, is not a detached explanation. The moment a person claims to grasp what is foreign, the urge to explain it should diminish, because explanation can create distance from what it purports to clarify.

This principle appears in the account of hunting and food, where knowledge is conveyed through action rather than abstraction. After a day of hunting, Smilla and the others eat narwhal skin; later, after twenty-four hours without food, she joins an effort to catch birds with a large net. On her second attempt she catches three. She then imagines the young waiting for the birds and the chain of lives behind them, and releases the birds rather than completing the hunt. The scene does not offer a general statement that resolves the relationship between need and killing. Instead, it shows perception changing within a particular practice, and the choice that follows from that perception.

Smilla sets this intimate knowledge beside the larger political landscape. The factory grounds of the former cryolite works have become a demolition site, but the remains still map the old system: rail ties mark the ore’s route from the dock, while workers’ buildings and laboratory structures stand amid the abandoned industrial ground. Nearby, residential life occupies a different arrangement of space. The former mine is not merely a vanished workplace; its physical remains prompt Smilla to ask whether they form a portrait of Denmark’s relationship with its former colony—one of disillusionment, resignation, and retreat, while retaining administrative control over foreign policy, mineral rights, and military interests.

That apparent retreat does not mean that the relationship has ceased to shape Greenland. The novel describes recent military ships, restrictions on entry to Qaanaaq, and the immense Greenland Star platform off Nuuk, assembled from 25,000 linked metal pontoons and anchored far below the sea surface. Political language calls such development dynamic, but Smilla identifies coercion as part of its purpose. The coercion, she stresses, no longer needs to take the form of direct military violence against Greenlanders. Appeals to greed can do the work that overt force once did, drawing people and institutions into a system organized around a Western mixture of acquisitiveness and naivety.

Historical change and colonial persistence

The novel’s account of colonial subordination is therefore neither a claim that nothing has changed nor a declaration that change has brought equality. The reduction of overt force, the merger of the cafeterias, and the formal language of equal rights all register real shifts. At the same time, access remains subject to security oversight, economic opportunity is tied to Danish language and institutions, and ownership and development continue to be directed through structures in which Greenlanders do not necessarily control the decisive choices. The mechanism changes from direct exclusion or visible force toward administrative screening, economic dependency, and promises of development.

This layered picture gives the subject its significance within Smilla’s story. Her ability to navigate expeditions, read snow, and recognize the conditions of life in Greenland comes from forms of knowledge that institutional authority can use without fully understanding. She is granted access because of her expertise, yet the terms of that access—secrecy declarations, restricted information, and security oversight—make clear that permission remains conditional. Her memories of language loss and her mother’s refusal to fit European expectations further expose the gap between being classified by Danish institutions and being understood through lived experience. Greenland’s colonial subordination is thus shown as an ongoing contest over not only land and resources, but also movement, language, knowledge, and the power to define what counts as progress.